Umm... Veer Savarkar was born nearly three decades into the heyday of British imperialism in India. Hindutva arose as a concept and reaction to the heavily educated Maratha, Bengali and Awadhi civil servants and middle class studying the past of their nation and understanding the past one thousand years of invasion and conquest by foreign powers.
The goal of the Maratha Empire was not to establish a ‘great Hindu Empire’. Nor was it to completely conquer the subcontinent (at least till the Bajiraos). It was to erode the political authority of the Mughal Empire. All that came alongside this was something similar to the Norman expansions that Europe saw in the 11th and 12th centuries. Though it can be easily argued that the Mughals also did exactly this, their very adherence to an Imperial bueareaucracy akin to China stopped them from achieving the same amount of cultural unity that the decentralised Maratha princes had. The lack of a powerful Peshwa or Shogun analogue alongside the Badshah meant that there was no strong position of power to unite the princes when the princelings and feudatories began jockeying for power with the British.
I mean down the road for Savarkar. If the Empire lasts, declines, and has a a revivalist demagogue figure in Savarkar.
The original goal vs the perceived goal down the road is important. There’s always the real political goal but if today in India a large segment of the population believes the purpose was to establish Hindu rule, then if the Marathas successfully unite most of the Subcontinet by ousting the Mughals, Nizam, Mysore (under Muslim rule) Oudh and Bengal, it would be with the goodwill of the Hindu populace and their liberation due to the Hindu religion affiliation. Thus this develops a conscience within majority of the state that the Maratha cause is one of Hindu nationalism, which would help the Marathas (make them Indian Prussia) centralize. After a period of troubles in a second phase (after a gen or two) Savarkar could win
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